- AWK, launched in 1977 and a core part of the UNIX operating system received an update 47 years after its release.
- One of its three creators, Brian Kernighan stated that he could find a bit of spare time and got back to futzing around with Unicode in AWK.
- Kernighan stated that he found a realloc bug in the update, thus there might be more bugs so, more testing is needed.
AWK, a core part of the UNIX Operating system, received an update 47 years later. AWK’s name refers to its three original developers, Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. And the update was announced by Kernighan with a GitHub entry, entitled “Add BWK’s email“.
Updated in May
While the update was released in May, most people learned about the new release after a recently published interview with Kernighan. Kernighan, creator of the name UNIX and inventor of the “Hello world” programming language demonstration.
In the release note, he stated that he found a realloc bug in the update and he suspects that they may be more and more tests are needed. Brian Kernighan, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University said,
« Finally, with a bit of spare time after the academic treadmill slows, I have gotten back to futzing around with Unicode in awk. I now have it mostly working (modulo inadequate tests), through a combination of using utf-8 internally for functions like length(), and conversion to utf-32 in regular expressions. The amount of actual change isn’t too great, so I think this might be ok.
I have not looked at range matches for regular expressions, since require a lot of really fiddly code. I have not fixed the fnematch() code since I never noticed it before. It looks like the ranges will work as is; fnematch needs fixed but I think it should be fairly easy. »